ABSTRACT
Ancient Ayurvedic texts laid emphasis on the outcome of illness as well as of therapy. This emphasis reached the zenith in its attitude to terminal illness and the extraordinary effort to look for signs in the body and its environment for the dissolution of the body. Though Ayurvedic texts deal with diseases and their management extensively, Ayurveda regarded health as the natural state of humans and disease as an aberration. According to Caraka, the equilibrium of the constituents of the body signifies the healthy condition of an individual and the purpose of his text was to prescribe guidelines for its achievement. Diseases in diverse forms and locations are the expressions of diverse and changing combination of dosas, body constituents, and malas; and different sites of the perturbation of dosas and different precipitating factors. The progress of imperceptible events in the body during the incubation period could be called disease process or patho-physiology in modern terminology.
